Top 500 Fredrik Backman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

— Fredrik Backman

2. “Culture isn’t just what we encourage but what we allow to happen.”

— Fredrik Backman

3. “Train hard, win easy.” “Team before individual.”

— Fredrik Backman

4. “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore. You’re good enough.”

— Fredrik Backman

5. “If you want to achieve what no one else can, you have to do what no one else wants to do.”

— Fredrik Backman

6. “He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.”

— Fredrik Backman

7. “If you spend your whole life being someone else, who will be you?”

— Fredrik Backman

8. “Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details. Even when you are wrong. Especially then, in fact. A grandmother is both a sword and a shield.”

— Fredrik Backman

9. “It wasn’t your fault.”

— Fredrik Backman

10. “A long marriage is complicated. So complicated, in fact, that most people in one sometimes ask themselves: ‘Am I still married because I’m in love, or just because I can’t be bothered to let anyone else get to know me this well again?”

— Fredrik Backman

11. “Because life is all about the small margins.”

— Fredrik Backman

12. “You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was.”

— Fredrik Backman

13. “Loving someone is like moving into a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather its imperfections.”

— Fredrik Backman

14. “Everyone has their own struggle.”

— Fredrik Backman

15. “Ignore everything else, just concentrate on the things you can change.”

— Fredrik Backman

16. “I want you to always remember that you can become whatever you want to become, but that’s nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are.”

— Fredrik Backman

17. “The path back to normal life is indescribably long once death has swept the feet out from under those of us who are left. Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it.”

— Fredrik Backman

18. “We’re bad losers, because a good loser is someone who’s used to losing!”

— Fredrik Backman

19. “A great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”

— Fredrik Backman

20. “He said that even if he knew that the world was going to hell tomorrow, he’d plant an apple tree today.”

— Fredrik Backman

21. “Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes much easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn’t through love, because love is hard. It makes demands. Hate is simple.”

— Fredrik Backman

22. “Human beings are the only animals that smile as a gesture of peace, whereas other animals show their teeth as a threat. This is perfectly understandable now; she can see the animal inside the human being.”

— Fredrik Backman

23. “For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

— Fredrik Backman

24. “Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it.”

— Fredrik Backman

25. “Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”

— Fredrik Backman

26. “There’s nothing wrong with being different. Granny said that only different people change the world.”

— Fredrik Backman

27. “But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us.”

— Fredrik Backman

28. “To you who talk too much and sing too loud and cry too often and love something in life more than you should.”

— Fredrik Backman

29. “Culture is as much about what we encourage as what we permit.”

— Fredrik Backman

30. “They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”

— Fredrik Backman

31. “If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.”

— Fredrik Backman

32. “It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”

— Fredrik Backman

33. “You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”

— Fredrik Backman

34. “You try to be a good parent, in every way, but you never know how. It’s not a difficult job. Just impossible.”

— Fredrik Backman

35. “She suffers from being so organized – if you show you’re capable, you get even more to do, that’s the curse of being a smart girl.”

— Fredrik Backman

36. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

— Fredrik Backman

37. “And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”

— Fredrik Backman

38. “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

— Fredrik Backman

39. “We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”

— Fredrik Backman

40. “Hockey is a simple sport: when your desire to win is stronger than your fear of losing, you have a chance. No one wins when they’re frightened.”

— Fredrik Backman

41. “It’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

— Fredrik Backman

42. “My dad says pressure is a privilege. If you don’t feel pressure, that’s just because you’ve never done anything valuable enough for people to have expectations of you.”

— Fredrik Backman

43. “Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.”

— Fredrik Backman

44. “Team before self. Club before individual.”

— Fredrik Backman

45. “If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust them with anything more important either.”

— Fredrik Backman

46. “So play. Learn. Grow up. Follow your passions. Find someone to love. Do your best. Be kind when you can, tough when you need to be. Hold on to your friends. Don’t go against the direction of the painted arrows in the floor. You’ll be just fine.”

— Fredrik Backman

47. “Because if you want to become the best at something, you have to sacrifice everything else.”

— Fredrik Backman

48. “One of the first things you learn as a leader, whether you choose the position of have it forced upon you, is that leadership is as much about what you don’t say as what you do say.”

— Fredrik Backman

49. “What feels comfortable for the parents isn’t what’s best for the child...”

— Fredrik Backman

50. “Do you remember what you always said when we went fishing on the island and slept in the tent? There’s nothing wrong with being a bit scared, you said, because if you wet yourself it’ll keep the bears away!”

— Fredrik Backman